August 19,
2013 "Information
Clearing House"
- In a stunning diplomatic surprise, Turkey and Iran
have announced a preliminary agreement on
fundamental principles for a settlement of the
Syrian conflict.

The
dramatic turn in the diplomacy of the Syria War was
revealed in Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim’s
regular weekly speech to the ruling AKP Party in the
parliament and confirmed by a senior Iranian foreign
ministry official Tuesday.

Both
Yildirim’s speech and the Iranian corroboration were
reported Tuesday by Al-Araby Al-Jadeed and Al-Hayat,
Arabic-language newspapers published in London, but
the potentially pivotal development has been
unreported thus far in Western news media.

The common
approach to a Syria settlement outlined by Turkey
and Iran represent what appears to be the first
significant diplomatic break in a five-year
international conflict on Syria that has been immune
from any real peace negotiations up to now.
International conferences on Syria under UN auspices
have generated no real moves toward compromise.

The new
negotiations between Iran and Turkey are the result
of a major policy shift by the government of Turkish
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan toward diplomatic
cooperation with Russia and Iran on Syria and away
from alignment with the United States and its Gulf
allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Turkey has been
coordinating military assistance to the armed
opposition to the Assad government – including
jihadists and other hardline extremists – with Saudi
Arabia and Qatar since early in the war. However,
Erdogan began searching in May for an alternative
policy more in line with Turkey’s primary strategic
interest in Syria: containing the threat of Kurdish
demands for a separate state.

The
announced agreement on broad principles for ending
the Syrian crisis is only the beginning of a process
of negotiations on the details of a settlement, as
Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Jaberi Ansari
made clear. “This agreement on the general lines
will contribute to creating an environment suitable
to solving the Syrian crisis,” Ansari said,
according to Al Hayat.

It is also
possible that Turkey may be planning to use the
threat of allying with Russia and Iran on Syria to
force the United States to reduce its own reliance
on Kurdish forces in Northern Syria – the main issue
dividing US and Turkish policies toward the
conflict. But Yildirim had already hinted last month
– before the failed military coup in Turkey and the
launching of a new offensive by al-Qaeda’s al-Nusra
Front around and in Aleppo – at Turkey’s intention
to revise its policy toward Syria in order to
prevent Kurdish forces in Syria from establishing
their own mini-state.

Yildirim
said in his speech Tuesday that the solution to the
Syrian crisis would require “two basic conditions:
first to preserve the territorial unity of Syria and
second, establishing a system of government in which
all ethnicities and religions are represented.”

In the
context of the territorial unity issue, Yildirim
raised the specter of an international drift toward
the partitioning of Syria. “Someone would come and
say, I will give the West of Syria to one,” he said,
“and the south to another and the north to the
Kurds.”

“This is
not possible,” said Yildirim, meaning that Turkey
would not stand for it.

The Turkish
prime minister’s reference to the threat of
partition in general and Kurdish inheritance of much
of northern Syria in particular was clearly aimed at
the Obama administration’s de facto military
alliance with the
YPG militia units of the
Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the war
against Daesh. That policy has encouraged the Kurds
to continue to extend their territorial control
westward along the Turkish border.

Turkey is
especially upset that the YPG units have already
moved west of the Euphrates River, which was
Turkey’s publicly announced “red line,” and don’t
intend to stop. Turkey has been demanding that the
United States keep its promise that the Kurds will
retreat to east of the Euphrates, but the YPG has
said it intends to link Manbij – the city west of
the Euphrates that it has just helped recover from
Daesh – with Afrin and then gain control of al-Bab
city on the border, thus uniting two previously
separate Kurdish zones of control.

Turkey
fears that a consolidation of Kurdish power over
such a large territory on the Turkish border will
embolden the militant
Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey to
demand its own state. “A Kurdish state in the Middle
East,” Yildirim declared, “will not bring a
solution.”

On the
second condition for a settlement, Yildirim said
there is a “possibility to establish a Syrian
administration in which all of Syria’s religious
communities and ethnicities can be represented….”
After that was accomplished, he said, “there will be
no obstacle to reaching a solution.”

Al-Hayat
quoted Ansari as saying that a third principle
discussed but not agreed on was that “the Syrian
people will decide their own fate.” That was
apparently a coded reference to the fate of Syrian
president Bashar al-Assad. Turkey has publicly
insisted in the past that Assad must step down
before a settlement can be reached.

Yildirim’s
language on the second principle and Ansari’s
further clarification suggest that Turkey is
dangling before Iran and Russia the possibility that
Assad could remain in the government if Turkey is
satisfied with a set of reforms to assure that all
ethnic and religious communities in Syria have
adequate political representation. Despite
speculation by pundits that Iran would not mind
having Syria carved up into a set of enclaves under
foreign protection, Tehran has responded with
unconditional endorsement of the Turkish demand.

The
principles that have been announced indicate that
Turkey will insist on Russia and Iran using their
weight in Syria to pressure the Kurds to retreat
from their territorial gains in the northwest.
Turkey, in return, would have to halt all support
for the armed opposition, starting with its favorite
Syrian military client Ahrar al Sham and that
group’s close political-military ally, the newly
renamed Jabhat Fateh al-Sham – the al-Qaeda
affiliate formerly called Jabhat al-Nusra.

Russia was
instrumental in initiating the new diplomatic
approach with Turkey. On August 8, just before
Erdogan met with President Putin in St. Petersburg,
Mikhail Bogdanov, Russia’s deputy foreign minister
for Middle East and Africa, met with Turkish Deputy
Foreign Minister Ahmet Yildiz for four hours, Iran’s
Ansari told Al-Hayat.

After that
summit, Bogdanov briefed Iranian Foreign Minister
Mohammad Javad Zarif on the Russian-Turkish
discussions related to Syria. That led to Zarif’s
crucial visit to Ankara last Friday – including a
meeting with Erdogan – which Ansari said was
necessary to the formulation of the framework that
was agreed to by Turkey.

The two
countries will try to keep the diplomatic momentum
toward an agreement this coming week, when Turkey’s
Yildiz will travel to Tehran for more negotiations
on the framework, according to Al-Hayat. Although it
is still partial and tentative, the framework
appears to offer far more hope for peace than any
cooperation between Russia and an Obama
administration without any consistent strategy.

Gareth
Porter, an investigative historian and journalist
specializing in US national security policy,
received the UK-based Gellhorn Prize for journalism
for 2011 for articles on the U.S. war in
Afghanistan. His new book is Manufactured Crisis:
the Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare. He can
be contacted at
porter.gareth50@gmail.com

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